Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Ostrova ·
My Wreaths Renewed
Every spring the memorial wreath in Kelsall Yard is turned out fresh by no hand that any of us can produce, and I price the flowers myself.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Ada Mompesson, florist"
I am a florist on Ostrova and I have been the florist since 1949, which is to say I price things for a living and have priced this now for thirty-one springs.
The memorial stands in Kelsall Yard, a low slate stone with nine names in a single line, and the borough lays a wreath on it each Remembrance and leaves the wires and the ribbon and the wetted foam block to the winter. By the spring the wreath is a wreck. Anyone in the trade knows the wreck: the flowers gone to grey felt, the foam crumbled, the ribbon bleached to the colour of weak tea, the wires burred at the ends where the gulls have tested the whole thing for a winter.
Every spring, by the first week of April, the wreck has gone. In its place on the stone stands a wreath in perfect current order: laurel, box, three or four flowers according to the season, wired the way they teach apprentices forty years out of date, and bound with raffia in the old style, which nobody has used in this business since rationing. It is laid flat against the slate, scored in the stone's shadow line so that it has plainly stood there some days before anyone notices it.
The borough does not renew it. I have asked at the depot and twice at the town hall, at counter one and at counter three because they change which counter does memorials. No order for Kelsall Yard is filed. The parks budgets show nothing. The borough's own foreman, a reasonable man named Tom Cleaver whom I have known since he was an apprentice carrying my buckets, walks Kelsall Yard on the spring inspection and codes the wreath in his book as previous year's stock, layaway, not our work, initialled A.M. — my initials, which I did not give him, which he took from the wreath itself as best he could read.
Because the wreath prices itself. That is my part in this and my only part. I know what went into a spring wreath of that making in that quantity, down to the spool of raffia, and I have written the price in my own order book every April since 1955, under the heading KELSALL YARD, RENEWAL — NO BILL. The heading is mine. The figure is never wrong, in the sense that it always matches what the wreath would have cost in the year it was made, by the prices of that year, which shift from decade to decade, so that my column comes back down to the old rates each spring and then climbs to whatever the current spring charges. Nobody has ever been billed and nobody has ever paid, and thirty-one figures sit in a column adding up to nothing owing to anyone.
I have tried every means of catching the making of it. I have priced out the hour. A wreath of that making, done properly, is a woman's afternoon plus a morning's soaking of the moss, at a bench. Ostrova is a small island and there are four benches on it, mine, the Noble sisters' at the ferry stores, the school's craft bench, and the bench at the chapel that is in use on any given Sunday I could name. I have checked them all with the owners' leave. Nothing.
The Nobles corroborate the renewal — they see the scraps arrive at their compost, every spring, felt and ribbon and crumbled foam, as if the wreck were walked off the stone to be taken — and Tom Cleaver corroborates the coding, and the chapel register corroborates that no funeral society or legion holds a round for Kelsall Yard. What I cannot corroborate is the hand. Thirty-one springs witnessed by prices and initials and compost, none by a person.
Whether anyone else has actually seen it being done, I cannot say honestly that anyone has. Nobody has shown me a bench with moss on it in March. Perhaps you will. I keep the column open.